25 November 2015

"I have a student who paints in a very strange way....I try not to influence him." - Peter Severin Kroyer

I. - Silence is the word most often used in connection with the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916). Hammershoi was a "strange" painter as his teacher, Kroyer, noted early on but that strangeness is more mysterious than received wisdom has it. Hammershoi himself stated more than once that what attracted him, in both interior and exterior settings, was architectural elements and the relationships between them. As for the deliberate minimalism of Hammershoi's interiors, the
Victorian taste for overstuffed interiors did not become poplar in
Scandinavia. When the Hammershois stayed in London they rented rooms near the British Museum, asking that knickknacks be removed from the reception room as they
distracted from the simplicity of the flat.
Even in his portraits, Hammershoi avoided narrative, as he explained to his brother Svend (also a an artist) in a letter written from London, regular portraits did not interest him. Of course, this left an opening for speculation that began with Hammershoi's contemporaries and continues to this day. What we are to make of the empty rooms that reverberate with emotions we cannot pin down? And what are we to make of the reserve of his human subjects, is it theirs or is it created by the painter?

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is also often invoked to explain Hammershoi's paintings. Kierkegaard's "infinite qualitative distinction" sounds like what we experience when looking at a Hammershoi:
"...one may risk saying something infinitely decisive and be quite correct
in what one says, and yet, ludicrously enough, say nothing at all. Hence
it is a psychologically noteworthy phenomenon, that the absolute
disjunction may be used quite disingenuously, precisely for the purpose
of evasion." - Soren Kierkegaard, 1846, from Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 313, Swenson & Lowrie translation.
But names like Kierkegaard or Hamlet are used as shorthand for anything Danish; the origins of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark are broadly Indo-European.

Vilhelm Hammerhois and Ida Ilsted married in 1891 and lived together contentedly until the painter died from throat cancer in 1916. Ida often appeared in interior scenes, usually with her back to the viewer - again not a regular portrait but more a quiet domestic scene. Interiors of their various Christianshavn apartments (30 Strandgade, 25 Bredgade, 25 Strandgade) are uniformly buildings from previous centuries, their stone facades usually left unpainted. Even the brick facades that were in common use during the 17th century were painted in colors that imitated stone.

The large windows at 30 Strandgade faced the harbor, visible between wings
of the Asiatic Company Building across the street. The Hammershois
lived there from 1898 to 1909. The
rooms opened on one another through a series of doors, rather than
being organized around a central hall. Most importantly. large windows filled the rooms
with light While they were in London in November 1912, their "dream"
apartment at 25 Strangade in the Asiatic Company Building became
available. They rented it, sight unseen.

Copenhagen's "gray overcoat" is the product of the soft northern light and the muted colors of its buildings. Depending on your viewpoint, the typical grayness of the air enveloping Copenhagen is either severe or dreamlike. Its similarity to the skies over London could explain why Hammershois felt more at home there than anywhere else they traveled to. Hammemrshoi wrote home that he could never digest the elaborate decoration of Paris or Rome, if he spent the rest of his life there; he knew exactly what - and how much - stimulation he needed in order to paint.

Christian
IV (1577-1648) was the Danish King as master-builder; his town and city
projects fill up the fingers of both hands and then some and still exist in
Sweden, Norway, and Germany as well as in Denmark.Christianshavn began as a program to fortify the capitol city of Copenhagen in 1612.To this end, earthen embankments were built
up in the marshy area between the city and the island of Amager to its
east.Christian employed Johan Semp to
create an urban plan for Christianshavn in 1617.By 1639 it had become an
established merchant enclave.

Strandgade
(Beach Street) extended the full length
of the island, following the harbor front.Semp’s original intention was to
build along one side of the street across from the water, leaving the beach
side to provide private harbor facilities for the lot owners who couldtransfer goods from ships to their
warehouses.

Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershoi from SMK - The National Gallery of Denmark is on view at Scandinavia House in New York City from 24 November 2015 to 27 February 2016.

II. - In Christianshavn there are canals around every corner. Warehouses and the ships that come and go, depositing their cargoes, are interspersed with residential apartments in a manner that modern zoning regulations have all but banished.
A city crisis-crossed by canals is a city in need of bridges.Earlier this year Cirkelbroen, or Circle Bridge, was built by Studio Olafur Eliaason near Christianshavn's south end. The five circular platforms are a pedestrian bridge that will become part of a larger pedestrian route around the Copenhagen harbor. The color red connects the bridge to the brick buildings at the side while the masts pay tribute the shipping trade that shaped and supported Christianshavn from its beginning.

Eliasson
believes that art makes life better,a
vision similar in spirit to the philosopher Horace's dictum that the purpose of
art is to delight and instruct.At the
moment this is an unfashionable notion at every level.Nevertheless, Eliasson says “I hope that
these people will use Cirkelbroen as a meeting place, and that the zigzag
design of the bridge will make them reduce their speed and take a break. To
hesitate on our way is to engage in bodily thought.”Like
Kierkegaard, a century and a half ago, who walked the streets of Copenhagen in order, he said, to compose his thoughts.

Note:
Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967 and grew up in Iceland and Denmark. After
studying at Royal Acadmey of FineArts
in Copenhagen he establishedStudio
Olafur Eliasson in Berlin where ninetypeople including architects,
computer programmers, art historians, and cooks work together on projects.Eliasson’s
Your waste of time was an
installation at MoMA PS1 last year that consisted of several chunks cut from an
Icelandic glacier, installed in a refrigerated gallery where they were on
display for nearly four months.

By the way there is more3 about Hammershoi on this site here and here and here and here.

18 November 2015

"It is the duty of us all to ensure that our society remain that of which we are proud, not a society wary of immigrants and intent on their expulsion or a society that disputes the welfare state or a society in which the media are controlled by the wealthy." - S.H.

"(But) there are unbearable things all around us. You have to look for them; search carefully. Open your eyes and you will see. This is what I tell young people: If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage." - S.H.

"The responsibility is that of the individual who will rely neither rely on a form of power nor on a god. You must engage - your humanity demands it." - S.H.

The late Stephane Hessel (1917-2013) was a German Jew, born in Berlin. Both his parents were writers; his father Franz Hessel was also a translator and his mother Helen Grund was also a painter and a musician. The family moved to Paris in 1924 and Stephane attended the Ecole Normale Superieure. Drafted into the French Army, Heseel joined the National Coiuncil of the French Resistance in 1943. He was captured by the Germans and sent to Buchenwald to be hanged just twelve days before the liberation of Paris, but after two tries he escaped. After World War II ended, Hessel represented France as a diplomat and official observer at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. His humanitarian efforts could fill a book. His words, reprinted above, come from one of his last books, Indignez-vous!

Time For Outrage: Indignez-vous! by Stephane Hessel, translated from the French by Marion Duvert, New York, Twelve Books: 2011.

“Mary Frank reveals herself once more to be the visual poet of the inner
life, evoking the pain and the mystery of our human embeddedness in the
natural world. She is not afraid of the large subjects, nor is she
reluctant to deploy her extraordinary skills as a creator of memorable
imagery in the service of our darkest memories: death, chaos, loss,
fragmentation. Nor does she trivialize tragedy and terror by suggesting
some easy redemptive value to be obtained from their contemplation.
Rather, the artist confronts this darkness of the spirit and wrestles it
into vivid pictorial expression."
- Linda Nochlin, 1998

Mary Frank (b. 1933) is an English artist who began by studying dance with Martha Graham. Although her mother was a painter, Mary is a mostly self-taught artist. Frank's sculpture seems to me to be her very finest work generally, giving the viewer a sense that her human subjects are embedded in the natural world. They remind me of Baruch Spinoza's vision of the divine as existing in the workings of the natural world; in his A Theological-Political Treatise (1670).

08 November 2015

I had never heard of Angela Perko until recently when I saw Wrapped Lemons apres W.J. McCloskey (above);I had heard of William McCloskey, but couldn't remember how although I did remember why. The elusive artist painted strangely captivating wrapped fruits, a genre he may well have invented.
The artist Angela Perko, also turns out to admire the Canadian artists known collectively as the Group of Seven, artists I've mentioned recently. Perko cites the group, especially its lone female member Emily Carr, as influencing her use of color. She arranges colors fearlessly, as comfortable with dissonance as she is with delicacy. Like the Seven, Perko explored painting through landscape; like McCloskey she was born elsewhere but eventually moved to California.
I think Perko's Wrapped Lemons refers to McCloskey's Florida Lemons (below). Perko's painting lets us imagine a world where our eyes can separate planes of vision. This feature, along with her use of depthless color achieved through barely visible brushwork, makes this a true cubist artwork. There is a sad story about the McCloskey painting. According to The City Review (May 21, 2014), it was offered for sale at auction in New York City but "It failed to sell."

We are spoiled; we take the year-round availability for granted of any fruit we desire. Historically speaking, this state of things began just yesterday but there are artists whose works remind us of the magical properties of fruit, especially citrus fruit, with its contrasts of sweetness and tartness in seductively tactile containers.

Wrapped Oranges, painted in 1889 by the little known William J. McCloskey, brought me up short when I first saw it (see below). These arrangements of fruits in tissue on what appear to be tabletops evoke a mysterious sense of place out of time, much as the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi' s empty rooms do. Tissue was the preferred method for packing these precious fruits for shipping before the days of refrigerated trucks..

The story of American still life painting begins with the Peales (Charles Wilson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Raphaelle Peale, Titian Peale, and Margaretta Peale to name just five of the prolific and close-knit family). Their paintings were among the best that a new nation produced during its early decades. The Peales were also known as experimenters in tromp l'oeil, a technique used to deceive the eye into seeing relationships between planes and dimensions that are not there in ostensibly realistic spatting.

Like the Peales, WillIma McCloskey and his wife Alberta Binford, painted works of great technical virtuosity; William excelled in portraits and fruit, Alberta in portraits and floral still lifes. It was while staying in Los Angeles during the 1880s that the young couple established their artistic reputations. Already southern California had begun to promote itself as the garden state of the west, home to plentiful orange groves. An unusual couple in many respects, the McCloskeys did not stay put, making their whereabouts at any given moment hard to pin down; but they lived in New York City (on 23rd Street near the Art Students League), London, and Paris and exhibited their works in Atlanta, Buffalo, and Providence, at least. Neglected after their deaths, McCloskey's wrapped fruits again attracted public interest beginning in the 1990s.
Both artists bring to the table, so to speak, an enthusiasm for paint that makes joie de vivre tactile.

Angela Perko is represented by Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, Santa Barbara.

For further reading about William McCloskey: Partners In Illusion: Alberta Binford and William J. McCloskey by Nancy D.W. Moure, Santa Ana, Bowers Museum of Art: 1996.

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Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins